The City of Gold has lost its glitter.
A gas explosion destroys a street in the inner city; illegal miners tunnel into dangerous old shafts; the no-go areas lost to criminals are expanding. The smell of decay, open sewers and uncollected rubbish is everywhere.
And now at least 76 people, 12 of them children, are burnt to death in a fire in a building right in the city centre. The youngest casualty was one year old.
Just weeks ago Scrolla.Africa published a series of interviews with the former MMC for public safety in Johannesburg, David Tembe. He told us that abandoned buildings are hijacked by dangerous criminals who take them over and rent them out to vulnerable people.
What kind of international city allows hijacked buildings to proliferate in its Central Business District, slums in the sky that are beyond the reach of law enforcement and into which poor and undocumented people are crammed?
Destitute people live there, many of them undocumented foreigners, who flock to the city in the hope of finding a better life. But they end up living under bridges or in broken buildings that have no water, electricity or toilets, let alone safety.
In the building where 76 people died on Thursday, there were eight people in one small room. People built shacks inside a building.
In August 2019 while Tembe was a chief of the metro police, he visited the same building where this tragedy happened. "We were there and evicted everyone from the building. How the people came back, we have no idea."
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Why has it taken so long for authorities to act?
Tembe said that the palms of high-ranking officials in the city are greased to fake documents for the criminals and then to look the other way.
Instead of doing their job and protecting people, some in government have sided with the syndicates, which has made them untouchable.
Political corruption is killing Johannesburg.
The devastation that swept the city on Thursday could have been avoided.
It is the responsibility of the whole government - national, provincial and metro - to clean up the city by targeting criminals and turning hijacked, dangerous inner city buildings back into safe zones.
For the sake of our humanity, it's time to reclaim our city -- or many more will die.
